Pope Francis salutes the faithful as he arrives for his weekly general audience, in St. Peter's square at the Vatican on April 30, 2014.
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ANDREW MEDICHINI, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The new pope has me thinking about my faith.

Pope Francis seems to represent a more modern Catholic church. His holiness laughs. He talks about our times. He has expressed more overall tolerance and acceptance that are a departure from the church’s non-negotiable, hard-line positions against divorce, abortion, women in the church and gay marriage.

Instead, he pushes for peace.

His willingness to acknowledge our diverse society has made the pontiff, since his March 13, 2013 installation, popular enough that he has graced the cover of, among many others, Rolling Stone.

He also has his own Italian fan mag - Il Mio Papa (My Pope), which hit newsstands at the start of Lent and features pope stories and pope photos, including a cassock-clad Pope Francis centerfold.

And, as a 21st century pope, he also has several video game apps, “Vatican Temple Run,” and “Pope Francis Daily Surprise” featuring inspirational quotes, and “Papa Francesco News,” which I downloaded onto my iPhone turned iPope.

At the very least, Pope Francis is making me think about going to church in a way that adding guitars and drums to a supposedly more rocking rendition of the “Our Father” ever did.

I was raised Catholic. I learned all the prayers and the rituals. I went to Sunday school and Mass, though I sometimes wedged homework or other readings into the missalette when, around age 8, I realized the prayers and the stories were basically the same every week.

My mom, my personal pope-stress, used to slap my hands, grab the missalette from me and point to cushioned pews, immediately prompting me to get on my knees, bow my head, close my eyes and put my hands together in prayer pose.

I mostly prayed that Mass would be over soon.

As a kid, I never thought about God or Jesus or Mary or the Holy Spirit. I had been taught to go through the motions, memorize the long Apostles’ Creed, and advance through the holy sacraments with other equally bored children. We were in captivity and sometimes, with helpless eyes, looked at one another like fellow inmates, each confined in our parental prisons.

I remember some basic ideas that made me check out early: mainly how men were more important than women and how adults were always correct and children wrong and needing to be saved from the devil.

I grew up in Catholic fear, being constantly reminded that I had to live according to the Ten Commandments or risk death by hellfire. “Honor thy mother and father,” No. 4 on the list, is the only commandment I didn’t have to write out on the crib sheet I tucked into my sneaker to cheat on a catechism test. (I later confessed that.)

Communion had its allure because I thought I’d at least get to walk around and get a wafer snack – and that we were only one prayer plus one priest’s closing message from getting to feast upon some post-Mass donuts. A lot of people went home after communion, and when I asked why we couldn’t do the same my mom looked at me with contempt.

My mother always had the answers, like when she’d write out a check for $25 for the church an hour after saying we didn’t have enough money to get me a new bicycle during our drive to St. Catherine’s Catholic Church in my hometown, Miami.

“God will give it back to you 10 times more,” she’d say, making it sound like donating to the Catholic Church was a stock or a Ponzi scheme.

I, of course, am still waiting for a $250 check.

Another time, my mother waited in line for 20 minutes after Mass to sign a petition against abortion. I wanted to go home, so I asked her why we needed to stay.

“So people don’t kill babies,” she said, showing me a pamphlet with two pictures: one of a fetus and the other of something grizzly and bloody and unrecognizable.

I didn’t understand abortion as a major issue for Catholics or a woman’s freedom, thinking only that babies are cute and shouldn’t be hurt. But even at age 13 I knew I wasn’t getting the whole story.

Confirmation during my teens was made to seem like a no-frills graduation compared to the massive-party Bar Mitzvahs my Jewish schoolmates had.

When Josh Levy had his Bar Mitzvah, he hit the motherlode with gifts, styling a new wardrobe and talking about all the new video games and music he got for the rest of the school year.

When I was confirmed, I got a silver necklace with a “charm” of a mostly naked, long haired and bearded, sad-looking man nailed to a cross.

“You can have your own Jesus now,” my mom said. “He died for us.”

Much to her ire, I said, “So did last night’s chicken. You don’t want me to wear that around my neck, right?”

I stopped going to church as soon as I left for college, though I did return to the pews during finals week. I would have sacrificed a baby lamb for a better grade in molecular biology. I only turned to prayer out of desperation.

But as I got older, I became curious about all those Sundays I spent practicing a religion I never chose. I sometimes read the Bible because I was alone in a hotel on the road as a sportswriter. My spirituality – not necessarily my faith in Catholic doctrine – became my most portable companion, and the golden rule my main moral guide.

I keep a “Buddy Christ” action figure (an enthusiastic, two-thumbs-up Jesus) on my desk to get me through writer’s block. I even occasionally went to Mass at St. Anne’s Catholic Church in Seal Beach, relishing the hour of silence and spirit, listening and embracing the messages about kindness, generosity and forgiveness while tuning out what didn’t seem to apply to me.

But I haven’t been in awhile.

This new pope sounds like he’d accept me in whatever open-hearted, true way I’d come back – even if he’d have to spend a year taking my confessions.

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